Wooden delivery for women of Troy

If any proof were needed of the fear Greek men had of female sexuality, the literary prominence of male ego-shrivellers, Helen and Clytemnestra, would be a point for departure.

In the spear-waving times of Homeric warrior society, it was easy for Menelaus to blame the Trojan War on Helen's affair with Paris and for Clytemnestra to be demonised for murdering Agamemnon on his return from the Trojan war.

Gina Landor's one-woman version of Andrew Rissik's much-feted Troy trilogy issues a fascinating response to the way both women were scapegoated.

It sinks the theory that Helen launched the 1,000 ships through humiliating Menelaus, instead arguing that she and her sister Clytemnestra were caught up in an imperial struggle where they were victims rather than villains.

It is a shame then that Landor's delivery is so leaden and pretentious that it obscures the humanity of the stories she is trying to tell. The compelling details are all there - Clytemnestra's unwilling participation in her husband's sacrifice of their daughter, Iphigenia, Helen's dis-taste at Menelaus's fumbling love-making - but Landor enunciates her words with the rigidity of a Greek statue. The women's personalities disappear as the heroines are reduced to the woodenness of that Trojan horse.